The Forever Man (4 page)

“I know what it is,” said Mary. “It's thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two.” Jim sneered. “So you've got all these extra vigorous years of life for people, have you? If they're all that vigorous, why can't they ride a Frontier ship after thirty-two? I'll tell you why. It's because they're too old, too old physically, too old in the reflexes and the nerves! Snatch all the ancient bodies back from the brink of the grave, but you can't change that. So what good's your extra sixty-eight years?”

“Maybe you ought to ask Raoul Penard that,” said Mary softly.

A dark wave of pain and unhappiness rose inside Jim, so that he had to clench his teeth to hold it back from coming out in words.

“Nevermind him,” Jim said huskily. For a second it was as if he had been through it himself, all the endless years, refusing to die, beating his ship back toward the Frontier, and the solar system, without being able to phase-shift—on his long, long way home. I'll get him home, thought Jim to himself—I'll get Penard to the home he's been after for more than a hundred years, if I have to take him through every Laagi Picket area between here and the Frontier. “Nevermind him,” Jim said again to Mary. “He was a fighter.”

“He still is—” Mary was cut suddenly short by the ringing of the contact alarm. Jim's fingers slapped by reflex down on his bank of buttons and some moments later their ship swam up beside a dust-scarred cone shape with the faded legend
La Chasse Gallerie
visible on its side.

In the same short moment, the other ships of Wander Section were appearing around the ancient spaceship. Their magnetic beams licked out and locked—and held—a fraction of a second before
La Chasse Gallerie
bucked like a wild horse and tried to escape with a surge at many gravities of acceleration.

Taken by surprise by a power kick that should have killed any human aboard the long-lost vessel, the mass of the five other ships still managed to hold her back.

“Hold—” Jim was whispering into the headpiece of his suit and circuits were translating his old-fashioned phrases into blinking signal lights beamed at the cone-shaped ship. “Hold,
La Chasse Gallerie
. This is a Government Rescue Contingent, title Wander Section. Do not resist. We are taking you in tow—” The unfitness of the ancient word jarred in Jim's mouth as he said it. “We're taking you in tow to return you to your Base Headquarters. Repeat…”

The flashing lights went on spelling the message out, over and over again.
La Chasse Gallerie
ceased fighting and hung docilely in the net of magnetic forces. Jim got a talk beam touching on the aged hull.

“...home,” a voice was saying, the same voice he had heard recorded in Mollen's office. “
Chez moi
...” It broke into a tangle of French that Jim could not follow, and emerged in accented English with the cadence of poetry. “...Poleon, hees sojer never fight—more brave as dem poor habitants—Chenier, he try for broke de rank—Chenier come dead immédiatement…”

“
La Chasse Gallerie. La Chasse Gallerie
,” Jim was saying over and over, while the blinking lights on his hull transformed the words into a ship's code over a century dead. “Can you understand me? Repeat, can you understand me? If so, acknowledge. Acknowledge…”

There was no response from the dust-scarred hull, slashed by the Laagi weapons. Only the voice, reciting what Jim now recognized as a poem by William Henry Drummond, one of the early poets to write in the French-accented English of the Canadian habitant in the nineteenth century.

“...
De gun dey rattle lak' tonnere
—” muttered on the voice. “
Just bang, bang, bang! Dat's way she go
—” Abruptly the voice of Raoul Penard shifted to poetry; in the pure French of another poem by a medieval prisoner looking out the tower window of his prison on the springtime, the shift was in perfect cadence and rhyme with the earlier line.

“
Le temps a laissez ton manteau—de vent, froidure, et de pluie
…”

“It's no use,” said Mary. “We'll have to get him back to Earth and treatment before you'll be able to get through to him.”

“All right,” said Jim. “Then we'll head—”

The moan of an interior siren blasted through his suit.

“Laagi!” yelped the voice of
Fourth Helen
. “Five bandits, sector six—”

“Bandits. Two bandits, sector two, fifteen hundred kilometers—” broke in the voice of
Lela
.

Jim swore and slapped his fingers down on the buttons. With all ships locked together, his phase-shift impulse was sorted automatically through the computer center of each one, so that they all shifted together in the direction and distance he had programmed. There was the wrench of shift-feeling—and sudden silence.

The siren had cut off. The voices were silent. Automatic dispersal had taken place, and the other four ships were spreading out rapidly to distances up to a thousand kilometers on all sides, their receptors probing the empty space for half a lightyear in each direction, quivering, seeking, while
AndFriend
stayed locked to
La Chasse Gallerie
.

“Looks like we got away.” Mary's voice was eerie in its naturalness, breaking the stillness in Jim's headpiece. “Looks like they lost us.”

“The hell they did!” said Jim savagely. “They'll have unmanned detector probes strung out all the way from here to the Frontier. They know we're not going anyplace else.”

“Then we better jump again—”

“Not yet! Shut up, will you!” Jim bit the words off hard at his lips. “The more they collect to hit us with here, the more we leave behind when we jump again. Sit still back there and keep your mouth shut. You're a gunner now, not a talker.”

“Yes sir.” There was no mockery in Mary's voice. This time Jim did not comment on the “sir.”

The seconds moved slowly with the sweep hand of the clock in front of Jim. The mind-unit had made its calculations and was ready to move. He waited. Inside the headpiece, his face was dripping with perspiration. The blood creaked in his ears—

Moan of siren!

“Laagi!” shouted
Fair Maid
. “Four bandits—”

“Bandits!”

“Bandits!”

Suddenly the helmet was full of warning cries from all the ships. The telltale sphere in front of Jim came alive with the green dots of Laagi ships, over and beyond the white dots of his own Section.

They came on, the green dots, with the illusion of seeming to spread apart as they advanced. They came on and…

Suddenly they were gone. They had winked out, disappeared as if they had never been there in the first place.

“Formation Charlie,” said Jim tonelessly to the other four ships. They shifted their relative positions. Jim sat silent, sweat dripping off his chin inside his Suit. He could feel the growing tension in the woman behind him.

“Jump!” It was a whisper torn from a raw throat in Mary. “Why don't you jump?”

“Where to?” whispered back Jim. “They'll have planet-based computers the size of small cities working on our probabilities of movement now. Anywhere we jump now in a straight line for the Frontier, they'll be waiting for us.”

“Then jump to a side point. Evade them!”

“If we do that,” whispered Jim, “we'll have to calculate.” He suddenly realized the other's whispering had brought him to lower his own voice to a thread. Deliberately he spoke out loud, but with transmission of the conversation to the other ships of the Section blocked off. “Recalculation takes time. They'll be using that time to find us, and they've got bigger and better equipment for it than the computing centers aboard these little ships of ours.

“But what're we waiting for? Why'd they go away? Shouldn't we go now—”

“No!” snarled Jim. “They went away because they thought there weren't enough of them.”

“Not enough? There were twice our number—”

“Not enough,” said Jim. “They want to kill us all at one swat. They don't want any of us to escape. It's not just La Chasse Gallerie. Enemy ships can't be allowed to get this deep into their territory and live. We'd do the same thing if Laagi ships came into our space. We'd have to make an object lesson of them—so they wouldn't be tempted to try again.”

“But—”

“Laagi! Laagi! Laagi!—”

Suddenly the pilots of all the vessels were shouting at once. Jim's hand slammed down on a button and four screens woke to life, showing the interior of the other four ships. The sight and sound of the other pilots and gunners were there before his eyes.

The spherical telltale was alive with green dots, closing in from all sectors of the area, racing to englobe Wander Section. “Hector! Pattern Hector!” Jim heard his own voice shouting to the other ships. “Hector! Hit, break out, and Check Ten. Check Ten….

They were driving toward one group of the approaching green lights.
La Chasse Gallerie
was driving with them. Over the shouting back and forth of the Wander Section pilots came the voice of Raoul Penard, shouting, singing—a strange, lugubrious tune but in the cadence and tone of a battle song. As if through the winds of a nightmare, Jim heard him…

Frenchman, he don't lak to die in de fall! When de mairsh she am so full of de game! An de little bool-frog, he's roll veree fat... An de leetle mooshrat, he's jus' de same!

The feeble rimes of the old ship reached out toward the incoming Laagi lights that were ships, pathetically wide of their mark. Something winked up ahead and suddenly the soft, uncollapsed point of the primitive, dust-scarred hull was no longer there. Then Wander Section had closed with some eight of the enemy.

AndFriend
suddenly bucked and screamed. Her internal temperature shot up momentarily to nearly two hundred degrees as a glancing blow from the light-weapon of one of the Laagi brushed her. There was a moment of insanity. Flame flickered suddenly in the interior of
Fair Maid
, obscuring the picture of it on the screen before Jim. Then they were all past the enemy ships and Jim cried “Transmit!” at the same time that he locked his own magnetic beams on the chopped hull of
La Chasse Gallerie
and tried to take her through the jump alone.

It should not have been possible. But some sixth sense in the singing, crazed mind of Raoul Penard seemed to understand what Jim was trying. The two ships jumped together under
AndFriend
's control, and suddenly all six ships floated within sight of each other amid the peace and darkness of empty space and the alien stars.

Into this silence came a soft sob from one of the other vessels. Jim looked and saw the charred interior of the
Fair Maid
. Her pilot was out of his seat and half-crouched before the equally charred, barrel-suited figure in the gunner's chair.

“
Fair Maid
!” Jim had to repeat the call, more sharply. “Fair Maid! Acknowledge!”

The pilot's headpiece lifted. The sobbing stopped.

“
Fair Maid
here.” The voice was thick-tongued, drunk-sounding. “I had to shoot my gunner, Wander Leader. She was burning up inside her suit. I had to shoot my gunner. She was burning up inside her—”

“
Fair Maid
!” snapped Jim. “Can you still compute and jump?”

“Yes…” said the drugged voice. “I can compute and jump, Wander Leader.”

“All right,
Fair Maid
,” said Jim. “You're to jump wide, angle off outside Laagi territory and then make your own way back to our side of the Frontier. We're close enough to outside both territories for that now. Have you got it? Jump wide, and make your own way back. Jump far enough so that it won't be worth the trouble to the Laagi to go after you.”

“No!” The voice lost some of its druggedness. “I'm staying, Wander Leader. I'm going to kill some—”

“
Fair Maid
!” Jim heard his own voice snarling into his headpiece. “This Section has a mission—to bring back the ship we've just picked up in Laagi territory! You're no good on that mission—you're no good to this Section without a gunner. Jump wide and go home! Do you hear me? That's an order. Jump wide and go home!”

There was a moments' silence, and then the pilot's figure moved and turned slowly back to sit down before his controls.

“Acknowledge,
Fair Maid
!” snapped Jim.

“Acknowledge,” came the lifeless voice of the pilot in the burned interior of the ship. “Jumping wide and going home.”

“Out then,” said Jim in a calmer voice. “Good luck getting back. So long, Jerry.”

“So long, Wander Leader,” came the numb reply. The gloved hands moved on the singed controls.
Fair Maid
vanished.

Jim sat back wearily in his pilot's chair. Hammering into his ears came the voice of Raoul Penard, now crooning another verse of his battle song….

…Come all you beeg Canada man. Who want find work on Meeshegan, Dere's beeg log drive all troo our lan', You sure fin' work on Meesh
—

In a sudden reflex of rage, Jim's hand slapped down on a button, cutting off in midword the song from
La Chasse Gallerie
.

“Jim!”

The word was like a whip cracking across his back. Jim started awake to the fact of his passenger-gunner behind him.

“What?” he asked.

“I think I've got my second wind in this race,” answered the even, cold voice of Mary. “Meanwhile, how about turning Penard back on? My job's to record everything I can get from him, and I can't do that with the talk beam between his ship and ours shut off.”

“The
Fair Maid
's gunner just died—”

“Turn the talk beam on!”

Jim reached out and turned it on, wondering a little at himself. I should feel like shooting her at this moment, he thought. Why don't I? Penard's voice sang at him once again.